Endpoint mobility management allows users to bring their own device to organization, and allow users to securely access corporate resources using that device. Until recently, corporate email was dominated by the use of Blackberry devices and the Blackberry enterprise server (BES). Using the Blackberry model, an email client was part of the operating system of the mobile device, while the enterprise server could directly access corporate email on the corporate network and act as a proxy to forward email to the device. As corporations have expanded away from the Blackberry model, new mobile operating systems, such as Android, iOS, Windows phone, etc. have become commonplace. While most of these mobile operating systems include a native email client, these clients lack data security controls for corporate data.
Meanwhile, third party applications have become commonplace on mobile devices, as users strive for additional functionality. While these applications may provide additional functionality not provided by the operating system or native applications provided with the operating system, many mobile operating systems do not afford these applications the same privileges as native applications. For example, iOS provides a native email client that can persistently run, allowing it to update the status of messages on the device home screen, while it runs in the background. Meanwhile, third party email clients can only run while the user is actively using the application, or for a short time thereafter. This means that these third party email applications need to use additional tricks to update email status and real-time, when the app is not actively opened.
Certain email applications, such as Gmail from Google, utilize a server-based service provided by Apple for iOS, called Apple push notifications (APNS). APNS is a service provided by the operating system vendor that allows registered applications and software vendors to push notifications from the Internet to the device operating system, once a user has granted such permissions. However, for a messaging application to utilize these push notifications, some server or cloud-based component of that application needs to have access to email messages stored on the server. In the example of Gmail, this is not a problem, because the Gmail application works with email where Google is the service provider, giving the Gmail application control over both the user experience on the device and the management and delivery of email messages at the server level. While this may be satisfactory for large ISPs, applications hoping to provide messaging support for corporate email resources lack the luxury of controlling the corporate email server, in addition to the mobile application.
Accordingly, applications for use with secure corporate email resources have generally lacked notification features like those provided by end-to-end email solutions or the native messaging applications provided with a mobile operating system.